Samsung’s flagship 970 Pro and Evo NVMe solid state drives are built for speed

Keeping the pedal pressed to the metal.

There have been several attempts to knock Samsung's 960 Pro and 960 Evo solid state drives down a peg or two since they arrived in 2016, and the one to finally do it is none other than Samsung itself. Today the company launched of its 970 Pro and 970 Evo SSDs, both of which ramp up performance over the previous generation drives.

These new models are the third generation of high-end consumer NVMe SSDs. They're designed based on the M.2 2280 form factor with the latest PCIe Gen 3 x4 lane interface and combine a new Phoenix controller with 64-layer 3D NAND flash memory. We have a full review of the 970 Evo drives, while we're still waiting for test samples of the 970 Pro.

According to AnandTech, Samsung has been using the same controller for some of its recent NVMe SSDs for other markets, including the PM981 client SSD for OEMs and the PM983 enterpise SSD.

It all adds up to faster speeds than before. Samsung says the 970 Pro can deliver up to 3,500MB/s of sequential read performance and up to 2,700MB/s of sequential write performance. Meanwhile, the 970 Evo is capable of hitting the same read speed, and comes close in write performance, delivering speeds of up to 2,500MB/s.

"The sequential write speeds represent an enhancement of up to 30 percent over the previous generation, thanks to Samsung’s latest V-NAND technology and the newly designed Phoenix controller," Samsung says.

Both drives take advantage of Samsung's intelligent TurboWrite technology, which uses a large buffer of up to 78GB to enable faster writes. They also both feature a 5-year warranty or up to 1,200 TBW (terabytes written), which is 50 percent higher than the previous generation.

Pricing and capacities are as follows:

Samsung 970 Pro 1TB: $629 (~63 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung 970 Pro 512GB: $329 (~64 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung 970 Evo 2TB: $849 (~43 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung 970 Evo 1TB: $449 (~45 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung 970 Evo 500GB: $299 (~60 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung 970 Evo 250GB: $119 (~48 cents per gigabyte)

Samsung says the 970 Pro and 970 Evo will be available to purchase starting May 7.